


Denial of License

by Xaidread



Series: Polyptych: Visitations [4]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Existential Crisis, Flashbacks, Gen, Post-Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, The Void
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 13:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16409657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xaidread/pseuds/Xaidread
Summary: The tapestry it tells is a dirge that binds him and sets his marrow in a roil; it is for him, yet not, inasmuch as he is but a single drop in the All that has been and will someday cease to be.How Daud comes to terms with the the god who made him into the man he became.





	Denial of License

**Author's Note:**

> This one's not actually complete and has been sitting in my drafts for a couple of months. Maybe someday I'll get around to elaborating what's the license of behavior in the title.
> 
> While I consider this a direct sequel to OLD in this series, there are details that don't line up with LOD.

Daud rises from the chair and collapses, unseeing. He finds himself prone when he awakens with crackling in his ears and the whisper of a name pulsing under his sternum — his own name.

Dark, it's all dark around him. What the fuck is wrong with his eyes? The floor pressing against his cheek and bare forearm feels cold and unyielding, and his ungloved hand scrabbles at its slick surface as he levers himself into a crouch. Points of contact — right elbow, hip and thigh — all protest while he gets the other knee folded under him to rise up onto his haunches. He brings his right arm in and braces it over the right knee now pulled up to his torso.

The Mark emits no foxfire flame of energy when he stretches out his other hand. His mind reaches within for the Sight and for a brief moment he beholds forms hidden in the Void's crushing depths before his vision flares out, blue-white like an overcharged light fixture. The noise in his head swells into an uproar of burning timbers and shrieking, twisting metal beams; over rock he writhes, and sparks of the beyond catch on the edges of his scattered consciousness. From throat to fingertips, he feels the constriction upon him like wires cutting into flesh, tendons, cartilage. The wall of noise gives way to a high-pitched animal pule. His thrashing gains purpose when he realizes it's his own voice and he brings his fist down several times to ground himself again with the focus of self-inflicted punishment.

By the time he regains his faculties, his being has subsided into a numbed throbbing as he lies supine. He sees, dimly, a vault of black stone hanging overhead. It makes him nauseous, this anticipation of being squashed flat by something whose dimensions he cannot grasp. He rolls away from the irregular, iridescent surface and lifts his head at the sight of a wide opening in the cavern. There's cause for regret when he reaches for the brink: the transversal knocks the wind out of him and once more he's left prone and panting. Below the precipice is an expanse of dark sea and, on the rims of its ripples, the warped reflection of an indeterminate light source. Drifting in the distance, black pillars pierce the edges of the horizon; the shine on their planes puts the bristle of unease over his nape. Another weaving of sound meets him as he makes to stand, reverberating sequences that grow deep and high by turns and fold into harmonic layers: bellowing, chirruping, clicking, moaning.

He huddles into himself as if shielding his lighter from wind. The tapestry it tells is a dirge that binds him and sets his marrow in a roil; it is for him, yet not, inasmuch as he is but a single drop in the All that has been and will someday cease to be. He bunches the blood-red fabric over his chest and uncoils a knot in his defiant heart; to the song he throws in cables of screaming rage. Hang the wretched whales, hang the Outsider, hang everyone who threw their hands into the unwinding of his life!

He's cut short by a choking croak, feeling cracked in the vocal chords. All choler now evaporated, he wants nothing but to hide away with the weight of a whiskey bottle in his sore hand and the lukewarm liquor's bite to wet his lips. He swallows dryly and tastes instead the Void's air, cold and brackish. Barren. Ensnaring all the same. He turns away from the view over the water, still shuddering while that ceaseless whalesong echoes within and about him. He staggers out a meandering path around slabs of deep purple slate, making his approach to the unearthly chant's muse at the center of the island. Strange it was how the compulsion to seek always began in his jaw as though he were some blind dog yanked along by a leash. But a hound he may as well count himself by the metric of his desire for mauling the black-eyed bastard's throat.

The Outsider was once the will-o-the-wisp on the mire whose guiding light had led him into a sinkhole. Daud dug himself deeper when that cold torch snuffed itself out, denying him the semblance of friendship he thought he had desired. It figures: a man goes blind when he points his eyes into the sun after a lifetime of skulking in the dark. Of course the creature only knew power; there was no surprise when he took it and turned it into profit. In the dead ashes, he sketched his impression of a perfect gang: all sharp metal and shadows. In exchange for service, he offered a kind of certainty, a purpose — that security of identity found in the common breaking, in training together, in the honing of craft. A web of contacts and contracts guaranteed bloodshed and coin. The magic had been the mainstay that gave his people their edge over other mercenary gangs and kept them cohesive. For nearly two decades he'd been the axis around which that murder mill revolved, then he cut loose and left the rest unmoored. While they scattered like sheets to the thirty-two winds, he never indulged in the fantasy that he could claw his way out of the pit, steeped as he was in blood and guilt.

Marching towards the heart of the frozen Abyss, he catches flickering forms in the periphery of his vision. Regardless of how much ground he covers, they remain distant pinpricks of light like the isolated lanterns of travelers passing through country roads awash with untimely downpours, their movements frenetic as though swinging under lashing gales. _Ever assailed by winds, murmured his mother on a fever-hot night, spirits wander the Howling Grounds like wolves never to find refuge in pack._  Whatever they're wailing for is drowned out by the whales.

The ache in his bones leads him true. A beacon of violet meets his eyes. The shape solidifies into a glowing structure. His paces eat the distance and he sees the rays shining forth, like veiny inclusions, out of a column of smoking black crystal that protrudes from floor to ceiling. The density of spirits near-yet-not-here is like a colony of moths winding tighter orbits towards dissolution. Without the Knife as their key, they're only approximating a cold reflection of heat behind glass panes.

And there it is, fixed against the pillar's base: the thing in the Void who made Daud. In his eagerness, he rushes upon the figure. He reaches forth his left hand, grasping not at magic but at the throat mockingly bared, grasping to slam back that head, to pin that bastard down and prepare to return all the pain he's been through in a rhythm of blows. His fingers close to crush that column of throat and he—

_his hand seared it's tearing him he's falling breathless he's drowning it floods his core a continuous shriek of solitary pain flaying him forever make it stop make it stop stop STOP STOP—_

Breathe: he does it, gulping up heavy air. Spasms rack his throat. Coughing and swallowing, near-simultaneous.

Reprieve: he finds it on the floor.

He rolls onto his front, digs an elbow forward, shifts his hips, starts crawling. The song ringing out from the body above him gnaws at his raw nerves. He can't trust his boneless legs to put the distance between them soon enough. A rise of stone meets him. He flattens against it, not even sitting up on his own power. Turning his head back into the pale light, he Looks upon his god with an unsettling clarity, as though seeing the simulation of flesh for the first time on a once-drowned statue now debrided of grime and marine growth.

Even before press releases from the Academy began covering excavations of the old city under Dunwall, anyone who'd been running the network of tunnels for long enough was bound to stumble upon masonry cut like nothing else the sun had seen since whatever weed the Morgengaards sprang up from in bygone days before that line braided the garland of Empire. Driving knives into bodies wasn't all Daud's old masters found he was good for; part of the front was playing at professional salvage in order to fence some of the pickings. He'd been one of the better divers for his age and owed those skills to his mother: the catch from the reefs off of Serkonos didn't hold a candle to her harvest grounds in the motherland, but she taught him that a skilled fisher could get a handle on any pole, net or pot.

Now and then, his dives brought him into the bowels of the city, prying out some bit of antiquity from silt and old shit. One landowner had been convinced by survey maps unearthed from her family archives that an ancient bathhouse had been situated below her waterfront estate, and a contractor tasked Daud's recovery team to haul up several pieces which would receive restoration work under finer hands. Years later, he learned that the landowner ended up donating to the Academy's collections a mostly-intact statue of a beast, some kind of primitive horse or hound stretched and twisted by the aesthetic demands of its artificer. He'd broken into the storage rooms on more than a few occasions during his term there and gave himself flimsy excuses to visit certain sections despite their irrelevance to his investigations. Whereas beholding that beast brought him some satisfaction, the mounting pressure in his Void-filled eyes prevents him from drinking in the sight presented by his quarry.

The Outsider stands stock-still, feet encased in stone, hands together as though bound, face thrown back and petrified in a scream. His eyes: ever black, terror-filled. His vital force shimmers like filaments of byssus underneath an extensive network of opalescent patches, while smoky coils of light-devouring shadow warp and writhe around a splatter over the front of his oddly-cut garment. Indistinct from the column's black crystal is his form under the outlines of the dark stain made by no weapon, magical or mundane, known to Daud. Cataloging completed, he lets the magic drain away.

Even though his whole being feels like it's been rattled through a drum of caltrops, he discerns nothing at all in that face to tremble at. No hateful sneer waiting to be pressed off by his bare knuckles. No reserves for more gloating than he ever asked for about those whom he has reaped as one of the specter's chosen few. He had thought youth was a facade the entity put on since the first meeting, when he'd been named _friend_  and plied with magic. The true facade was in the stillness: never had the full force of presence been with him in those visitations, only the projection of echoes from behind clouds of Void. Cold as the touches were from the Outsider's hand, they offered no real threat of harm to his person under the insulation of a flesh body. Here in the deepest Abyss, nothing but memory tethers him to material reality and his workings are exposed.

He drops his gaze to his lap whereon rests his Marked hand, palm-up. The same smoky substance blooming from the Outsider has smeared his fingers like lampblack. The adjoining wrist rotates and he is faced with the Mark's blazing blue glow from within an inky web of lines reminiscent of fungal mycelium; the rot settled in and something more strange has grown over it. It took so long, but he recognizes now that one tie held fast all through those years — perhaps even beyond his own prolonged life. There's no way to pin down when the meddling bastard had anchored the trajectory of so many outcomes to make the man he became. Once, he thought his fate was his own. He knows better, knows that the god can see anything from where he is — where they are — any when. He anticipated that Daud would leave indelible marks on lives to which he'd been entangled to bring down with him like a fucking mudslide when a season of rain sends an entire cliff face into collapse; he had foreseen and chose not to forestall.

Time unwinds at the edge of a knife. He pares memories into ribbons, slicing away layers to find that core moment when he had entered the Outsider's notice. Through the fog, he lays hold of a bone handle. Such clever knifework he'd been praised for as a child. He remembers the fit of it in his once-small hands as he held it at work: scraping fish guts, skinning rhizomes, whetting the blade's bite back into proper form, even the occasions when he got a hold on something dead to practice cutting into as his mother would incise patients. But never inscribing on shells or bones. He remembers sharp metal breaking off against bone encased in live flesh, the short-lived struggle with his captor. Blood: it ran under his desperate fingers, it welled up from within his tender skin, it flooded his mouth when his own teeth cut the inside of his lip.

What had led up to his being carved into a pawn? Maybe it began in his blood. Most people, no matter how pure of tone rang the charms and runes in their possession, went off sooner or later. The unworthy couldn't unlock their secrets, but the Outsider invited him to try — as if Daud had been waiting for anyone's permission. Ever since he landed on the shores of the Wrenhaven, he'd been conscious of something greater than himself buried beneath the wretched city. The handlers he left behind back in Serkonos held a closed-fist policy and seldom allowed the children keep much for themselves, while the new outfit that he wormed his way into offered comparatively more opportunities for enterprising young folks. With this newfound license, his hands always were reaching for anything that might give him an advantage; however, when it came to his share of the spoils, he consistently claimed — against his better judgement — the whalebone carvings above other, more liquid items. Son of a witch, it got him called, but only he had a grasp on the truth of it.

His mother had attained in her years a great store of herblore and knew remedies for a plethora of ailments, that he was sure of. Clients on occasion paid for her ministrations in scrimshaw. He wonders if she heard them shiver and sing as he has done since then, although he does not recollect from his curtailed childhood more than faint scratchings within his skull during the times those trinkets came under their roof. In such circumstances, she would weigh them in her hand, send the caller on their way, and cast the bones under moonlit nights to divine their properties. It was an art less exact than concocting drugs, and even then he had the impression that a mixture of detachment and vexation colored her meticulous study. Perhaps she was measuring the risks that the charms posed to her patients, being cognizant of their curious effects on others' wits and constitution. Certain people could easily fall into dependency on compounds hawked by less scrupulous sellers, and Daud came to learn the same proves true far more often in the case of whalebone. No doubt he inherited from her an intolerance for mystery, but what else had taken root in their archipelagic stock?

He'd been intent on sussing out the answers in his early years at Dunwall. What sort of affinity drew him to the bones? Why did he feel their influence so differently than did other people? He was sure that there was more to shielding his sanity than the fortitude of his will alone, yet he dared not reveal how unversed he was in magic to other suspected practitioners after taking pains to carefully cultivate his witchborn reputation. Therefore, his sole venue of investigation lay in seeking the shrines for the Outsider himself to divine Daud's nature.

Barely a dozen years had passed since the Morley Insurrection found its conclusion at the knees of a shattered state. _(And is it not curious that an entity without its head stands to best another so long as strength enough to strangle still exists within its limbs?)_ Under the standards of normal society, some parts of Dunwall and its surrounds have never recovered. Such places abandoned to ruin attract underground elements seeking shelter from the prying eyes of the law. But sometimes the law comes knocking when it's least expected.

Bone in his hand again: the ugly arc of jawbone from an adult bloodox, sun-bleached and gristle-free but otherwise unprocessed.

He should never have gone alone, not that there'd been many he could count on to watch his back in those days. It was easy enough to intercept a tip-off to a corner chapel about a cache of heretical artifacts that some small-time black marketeers were planning to move. The operation was situated in an old warehouse whose faded billboards declared it belonged to a then-shuttered branch of a leather trading company based in Morley. Rusted solid was how he found the first locks at ground level, and several other access points had been barred shut from within. A circuit around the premises brought him to a crane at the building's dockside, where he supposed shipments of byproduct from Slaughterhouse Row used to be received. The rope wound at the treadwheel's axle was intact and fresher than it ought to be; the structure's arm rose over a platform on the second level. He used a mallet that he found nearby to soundly knock the axle and its fixings into place; nothing could help the creaking once he got the line unwinding, but it wouldn't do to have the wheel come undone as well. He could survive a dip in the chilly water, if nothing collided with his head. Rarely did others fare well in sub-optimal circumstances.

As soon as the hook and chain at the end of the rope were within reach from the ground, Daud stepped out of the wheel and made a swift climb. After swinging past the guardrail onto the platform, he began hauling in the cordage until chain links clinked in his hands; then he severed metal from twine and fastened the frayed end onto the rail. A few passes of the crank-wheel installed on the platform brought the door up just enough for him to duck in at a crouch. He secured the wheel by looping the chain into its spokes; as an afterthought, he turned to add a large knot higher up along the rope's length in case the smugglers should try reeling the line behind his back.

Within the warehouse's gloom, he shut his eyes, stilled his breath, listened for the whisper of whalebone. Nothing. Maybe the tip-off had been wrong or a rival wanted to sic the Overseer hounds on somebody's ass. Then it came to him from above as a kind of thrum that vibrated in his diaphragm. His right hand went up to his ribs, palming a row of bonecharms sewn under his buff jerkin. The frequencies didn't match — something unique? At first he saw the tops of empty shelving racks that filled the floor below in rows, the rise of ladders on runners. Shafts of light from the intervals of high, narrow windows almost hid the catwalk up in the loft. He started forward but then caught the outline of a single crate by the door. Barely any shit worth locking up for, but he managed to scrounge a few dormant shrapnel mines to fill his pocket. Likely the smugglers got in ahead of the Overseer sweep. Regardless of any misgivings, he crept towards the bone-song and kept his eyes scanning for an access further up. The stagnant air, still reeking of decaying flesh and fish oil, seemed to quicken as he gained proximity to the source until he passed the spot directly below it. An unlocked door at the opposite end of the building led into a stairwell.

He had no difficulty finding the alcove, poorly concealed as it was behind boards. Dust-covered candles were arrayed on the floor; he lit a matchstick and stooped to touch its sulfur flame to frayed wicks, then raised a dish set with one stub of tallow. The illumination revealed panels of dappled oxhide nailed on the walls. Air shifted, rhythmic as soft breath, bearing a green-gold memory of grain fields in high summer. He approached the shrine and examined its meager offerings: set atop a dirty white pelt were a tarnished copper nose ring, a worn scraper made from a femur, and a bloodox mandible. Rustic Morlish superstition, all told. Unseasonable heat collected up here; he put down the candle and impulsively removed his gloves to wipe his sweaty hands on the hide curtains.

Banging from below, a crash. He stomped out the weak flames on the floor and returned to the catwalk for a view over the railing. A length of light spilled onto the ground floor.


End file.
